iphone

Khoi Vin finds another use for WD40...fixing an iPhone home button. My guess is that the spray oil is just helping to dislodge debris from under the button. Oil is a VERY poor conductor.

The Escapers (makers of Flux, Stuf and more) have an interesting new task management service called Instruktion. Or maybe it's called "New York Minute", it's not clear to me. It is cross platform and the apps are free. It requires a $20/year membership which sounds like a good price. It looks very nice on all of the application platforms and works offline too. I'm an OmniFocus user but I'll keep an eye on how this evolves.

My previous look at a beer inventory system focused on Bento. In this overview, I’ll explain my experiences while using Apple’s Numbers for the same purpose. Using the Mac Numbers already stands out as the best general spreadsheet application on any platform. But this is not a Numbers review. How does it work as an inventory application? Not surprisingly, it works like a spreadsheet. That’s not necessarily bad. The Numbers interface is nice.

[1]Avatron lanA Tron, the makers of Air Sharing, have released a new iOS and Mac Matt app named Air Dictate.[2] The application “integrates” with Siri on the iPhone 4S to dictate into any text field on the Mac. The Mac he MTac must be running the free companion application but the dictation results are placed in the currently active text editor. There is a brief pause will Siri does her magic and performs the translation but the dictated text is popped right into a Mac application without any further user interaction.

It’s the golden age of plain text editors. While Microsoft Word is bloated like a victim in a scene from Se7en, the geekier writers are moving to plain text en masse. One of the advantages of this golden age is that there are terrific apps like Elements[1] and Nebulous Notes[1] for editing plain text on iOS. Not only are these apps powerhouses as text editors, but they were built to integrate with Dropbox.

GoodReader for iPad (and iPhone) continues to get better all of the time. It’s the ugly Swiss Army Knife of iOS. AFP with Bonjour discovery makes it a simple process to get to files on a local network without needing to jump between the computer and the iPad. GoodReader can also connect to a Time Capsule over AFP. There’s also iCloud publishing and the ability to unRAR an archive. Too many great features to list here.

I purchased the PowerDock Dual from Amazon[1] to help cleanup the family charging stations. 2 iPhones, 2 iPads and 2 laptops all charging in one creates an overwhelming tangle of little white cables. Unfortunately the PowerDock Dual is poorly designed and just creates more problems than it solves The concept is great. The PowerDock holds one iPad and one iPhone with small coin dish between them. It looked like a smart solution.

A nice update to the best iOS GPS app. I’ve reviewed it before and love it.

iTunes Match is nice but it has not altered my enjoyment of iTunes. However, one thing has been a bit of a surprise. All music really means all music on my iPhone. Because I use my iPhone as a music device, I'm a smart list maniac. I have far more music than space (even on a 64GB iPhone 4S). I keep these lists on my phone: Best Songs smartlist (four or more stars) New 2 months smartlist (added within the last 2 months) Push to iPhone (manually curated list of songs/albums I want to always have available) Coding (manually curated list of music without lyrics.

The Telegraph has a good story about the man behind the UK version of Siri. Do we know the person behind the US Siri voice? I’m not sure I want to know. Without a face, everyone can project an identity onto Siri to fit their own inclinations.